FIS Teams with French Luxury Goods Conglomerate LVMH Group to Speed Cross-border Payments

FIS™ (NYSE: FIS), a global leader in financial services technology, today announced that it has connected LVMH Group to the SWIFT Global Payments Innovation (gpi), enabling the French conglomerate to enhance the efficiency and traceability of its cross-border payments.

Based in Paris, LVMH Group represents a broad range of luxury brands including Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy, Dior and TAG Heuer. About 65 percent of the multinational company’s payments go across borders. Historically, the company has had little visibility into the flow of those payments and relied upon largely manual means to trace progress, confirm settlement or address supplier questions.

FIS leveraged its Trax corporate payments factory, which provides corporate treasury functions a highly secure platform for consolidating and standardizing their accounts payments workflow, to connect LVMH Group’s partner banks to the SWIFT gpi. Through this successful implementation, LVMH Group has already benefited from automated payments reporting, enhanced visibility of its payments flow and reduced payment queries.

LVMH Group plans to expand its SWIFT gpi implementation across its full cross-border payment network, which processes more than 1.5 million payments annually.

“Corporate treasurers are increasingly seeking to manage their payments functions in real-time to enhance control and visibility of their cash flows,” said Steve Evans, head of Corporate Liquidity and Bank Treasury, FIS. “LVMH’s volume of cross border payments presented unique challenges for the company, and we are pleased to provide the tools needed to leverage these emerging opportunities.”

“This has been a great collaborative effort between our banks, SWIFT, and FIS that has already delivered tangible benefits to LVMH Group in our cross-border payments operation,” said Laurent Dall’Aglio, Finance project manager, LVMH. “We look forward to continuing this work and realizing the full promise of real-time cross-border payments.”

SWIFT gpi solves a number of challenges for corporate treasurers by allowing real-time tracking of payments, facilitating more accurate reconciliation, and preventing costly and time-consuming investigations for missing or incorrect payments. It has more than 280 banks onboard.